Validation of the diagnostic tool for assessing Tertiary students’ readiness for online learning

Increasing numbers of educational institutions are adopting an online approach to teaching and learning; however, little regard has been given to the prerequisite personal and technical qualities required for academic achievement and satisfaction within this environment. In recognition of this, researchers have been exploring the design, development and testing of diagnostic tools to assess student readiness for online learning. This study builds on previous work by the authors to further validate their diagnostic tool for assessing Tertiary students’ readiness for online learning (TSROL) which has four subscales: ‘Technical skills’, ‘Computer self‐efficacy’, ‘Learner preferences’ and ‘Attitudes towards computers’. Factor and reliability analyses revealed that Technical skills and Computer self‐efficacy possessed good reliability and validity, and ‘Attitudes towards computers’ fair reliability and validity. However, ‘Learner preferences’ required revision as it possessed poor reliability and validity. Analysing the demographic data revealed that older students had lower Technical Skills and computer self‐efficacy than younger students. The TSROL can be improved by adopting a more multidimensional interpretation of the Learning preferences and Attitudes towards computers subscales.     

Innocent Victims, Fighter Cells, and White Uncles: A Discourse Analysis of Children’s Books about AIDS

In this article, we examine a set of 26 children’s books on HIV/AIDS published between 1989–1999 to identify the ways in which these texts construct HIV/AIDS and people living with HIV/AIDS. We explore how this marginalized group is depicted in these books, and how well-meaning teachers may in fact be reproducing dominant discourses about HIV/AIDS in their curricula. In this article we focus, in particular, on how the discourses connected to public health, medicine, and secrecy (as a discourse across many institutions) are filtered to children and take part in constructing their beliefs and assumptions about HIV/AIDS. We illustrate our argument with examples from the books and show why teachers need to know how to analyze texts they select for their curricula so as to read books about HIV/AIDS critically in the classroom. Megan Blumenreich is Assistant Professor of Childhood Education at The City College of New York, City University of New York. Her research interests focus on urban schooling, poststructuralist approaches to qualitative research, and teacher education. She is the coauthor of The Power of Questions: A Guide to Teacher and Student Research (Heineman, 2005). Marjorie Siegel is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include transmediation and multimodality in literacy education, content area literacies, and literacies and technologies. She is the coauthor of Reading Counts: Expanding the role of reading in mathematics classrooms (Teachers College, 2000). M. Himley, “Teaching the rhetoric of AIDS: Blurring the boundaries.”     

A VSE equation of state for normal liquids—I. n-Heptane

A volume—entropy—energy (VSE) equation of state, unlike a PVT equation of state, can be used to calculate “all conceivable” thermodynamic quantities, including specific heats, without supplemental calorimetric data. A VSE equation for liquids, based on simple theoretical concepts, is proposed and, in this paper, applied specifically to n-heptane. This equation of state requires only ten arbitrary parameters, seven of which may be calculated from data at but three temperatures, e.g., 25°, 50° and the normal boiling point. It yields calculated values of many thermodynamic properties nearly as accurate as the best experimental data, from a few degrees above the melting temperature all the way to the critical temperature. PVT equations of state of comparable accuracy over such broad ranges would require at least as many parameters, as well as supplemental calorimetric data, to calculate many thermodynamic quantities that are obtainable directly from our VSE equation.     

Promoting student collaboration in a detracked, heterogeneous secondary mathematics classroom

Detracking and heterogeneous groupwork are two educational practices that have been shown to have promise for affording all students needed learning opportunities to develop mathematical proficiency. However, teachers face significant pedagogical challenges in organizing productive groupwork in these settings. This study offers an analysis of one teacher’s role in creating a classroom system that supported student collaboration within groups in a detracked, heterogeneous geometry classroom. The analysis focuses on four categories of the teacher’s work that created a set of affordances to support within group collaborative practices and links the teacher’s work with principles of complex systems. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, 2007 as part of the Tracking and Detracking SIG session Teaching, Learning, and Other Outcomes in Tracked and Detracked Environments.     

Shared understandings: environmental perspectives of Kenyan community members and teachers

Environmental issues are a shared human concern as communities in all nations and geographic regions are grappling with environmental degradation. Despite this concern, there are multiple different viewpoints on the current state of environmental issues and how to understand these problems. Understanding how different communities conceive of the environment and sustainability is paramount in efforts to increase the frequency of environmentally conscious choices. If an awareness of others’ perspectives of the environment is lacking, then the development of sustainable choices is placed at risk because of potentially competing views of what sustainability means in a particular context. As such, solutions to these environmental problems are frequently viewed as ‘wicked problems.’ This study investigates the shared and divergent environmental viewpoints of teachers and community members in Kenya. This study utilized photo-methodologies and qualitative in vivo analysis. The shared viewpoints were on positive and negative notions of environmental issues. The divergent viewpoints were on solutions that included types of innovations and amount of government involvement.     

Emerging local schooling landscapes: the role of the local authority

The school system in England is undergoing rapid change, with the government creating more than 4000 ‘independent publicly funded schools’, known as academies, since 2010. The potential for fragmentation is considerable with diversity of governance emerging as a key feature of the new schooling landscape. Consequently, a major and widely recognised issue to which these reforms give rise concerns the future of the ‘middle tier’ –that layer between individual schools or groups of schools and central government. There are competing visions of how a future middle tier might evolve: one focuses entirely on a middle tier of individual schools and chains as a ‘self-improving system’; others conceive a continuing but revised role for the local authority (LA). The aim of this paper is to begin to explore the latter position, and in particular the potential role of the LA as a ‘broker’ of new patterns of school organisation. Drawing on interview data from three very different LA areas, the findings show that LAs differ in how they conceive their role and, consequently, on the strategies that they pursue.     

身体成分研究的10大问题

摘要：理解身体成分对于理解人体健康、疾病和功能至关重要。身体成分的研究集中在评估方法的改进、对随着生长发育和老龄化身体成分正常变化的描述、以及由于疾病和计划性干预带来的身体成分的变化。每个关注点都很重要,从某种意义上来说,它们是相互依赖的。因为技术的进步使得更多复杂的问题被解决,反过来也推动研究方法的更好发展。尽管基础性的问题仍然存在,但每个领域里都有了明显进步。例如：生长发育的轨迹往往用横断面数据进行评估,考虑到也需要长期观察性资料,因此,也需要纵向描述性数据。随着实验室方法的改进,场地测试方法的发展对于筛选受试者和临床实践仍然具有重要意义。尽管已经认识到了干预应答存在广泛个体差异,但结果的均值仍然受到重视。随着技术的进步,可以研究引起身体成分变化的遗传和非遗传因素,但这些技术需要先应用于长期、控制严格的试验。在本文中,我们提出了该领域需要进行研究的10大问题,以推动该领域的发展。     

Adolescents’ sleep and adjustment: Reciprocal effects

Reciprocal relations between sleep and adjustment were investigated. Participants included 246 adolescents (M = 15.80 years; 67.5% White, 32.5% Black/African American; 53% female, 47% male) at Time 1 (data collected 2012–2013), 227 at Time 2 (M = 16.78 years) and 215 at Time 3 (M = 17.70 years). Sleep–wake variables were measured with self-reports (sleepiness) and actigraphy (average sleep minutes and efficiency, variability in sleep minutes and efficiency). Adolescents reported on depression and anxiety symptoms, and parents reported on externalizing problems. Greater variability in sleep duration and efficiency as well as sleepiness predicted adjustment problems (range of R²: 36%–60%). Reciprocal relations were supported mostly for sleepiness (range of R²: 16%–32%). Results help understand bidirectional relations between sleep and adjustment.